The main thing that matters to me is that the very obvious violations of existing criminal laws against fraud and theft and bribery and insider trading get punished – let’s start with that, then see what happens. I think we’ll find out ultimately that a lot of our economic problems stem from a general sense of lawlessness and the perception the banks have that if they all act in concert to ignore this or that regulation, and dare the state to do anything about it, they’ll probably get away with it. A great example is this whole fiasco with MERS, the electronic registration system for mortgages. Here you have a situation where the banks essentially decided en masse to systematically evade state and local taxes by foregoing local paper registrations, and then dared the fifty states and the countless counties to do something about it. However many years and a massive paperwork/foreclosure crisis later, they’re still getting away with this, because they enjoy a kind of political impunity that makes state and local prosecutors afraid of taking them on. So from my point of view, before we even worry about new laws and regulations, let’s see if it’s even possible, politically, to force these companies to follow existing laws. I think what we’d find out is that it’s probably easier to pass new regulatory laws (which can later either be ignored or pumped full of loopholes) than it is to enforce the meaningful laws already on the books.

Having the exact same reaction that we had when this schmuck was arrested for stealing Goldman’s secret cheating code:

When Aleynikov was arrested I heard from a half-dozen friends on Wall Street who all laughed about how quickly the FBI sprang into action when the victim happened to be Goldman Sachs. There are people out there who’ve had their homes foreclosed upon by mistake who can’t even get the Justice Department to agree a crime against them has been committed, so the fact that the FBI tracked Aleynikov down and arrested him literally hours after Goldman made the complaint should tell us all a lot. What’s even more amazing is that the code Aleynikov allegedly stole was almost certainly a tool Goldman was using to steal from the public using elaborate front-running technology. Basically if you want to manipulate the stock market, the FBI will race into action to protect your “intellectual property.”